Weekly Viz 2021-11-29

US Apartment Rent During Pandemic

This week when I was searching for the dataset to visualize, I first came across this article about housing rents bouncing back, so I thought, oh it would be interesting to look at the rent trend in the Bay Area. Then I found this article specifically talking about Bay Area rent during pandemic, and it leads me to this amazing data source on Apartment List, including apartment rent historic estimates since 2017 on county level. Therefore, I decided to make a viz to see how rent has changed YoY during pandemic.

My Visualization

The main pane of this dashboard is the county level map, with color indicating its rent change YoY at the selected anchor month. On the upper right, there is also a table showing the counties with highest rent drop during that one year period. Also, if you hover on a county on the map, it will show you the rent trend since 2019.

Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

Dashboard link

Insights

• Looking at the map, there is an interesting pattern of one or small number of orange dots (mostly the highly-populated counties) surrounded by blue dots, meaning the rent of those large counties have dropped while rents in its surrounding areas have increased – this corresponds with the news of people (especially tech workers) leaving tech hub counties and moving to lower-costs areas, ended up leveling up those areas’ rents;
• Comparing the rent in 2021 Jan with one year ago (2020 Jan), we see several top counties with most tech companies (and with historically highest rents) showing up on the list of counties with highest rent drops – this includes SF (-25%) and other bay area counties like San Mateo (16%) and Santa Clara (15%), NYC (-18%), King (-12%), etc.
• Looking at the most recent data in 2021 Oct, YoY most counties see positive rent change. However, if you look closely at the rent trend, rents in many of the counties we mentioned in the last bullet point have not bounced back to the pre-pandemic level yet.

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